It isn’t exactly clear how the qwerty keyboards came into existence with technology historians and keyboard enthusiasts all pointing to different stories and sources but out of the many theories out there, there are 3 main competing stories that attempt to explain how we ended up with the qwerty keyboard as a universal standard for all keyboards.
Story #1: Too Fast
The first story goes: In the olden days, mechanical typewriters could jam if people hit the keys too quickly, so a plan was made to put common letters far apart from each other, in order to slow down typists so their typewriters wouldn’t jam as they were typing. But this story is the least likely to be true because the qwerty keyboard puts the “e” directly next to the “r” this is an efficient way to organize those letters because “er” is the 4th most common letter pairing in the English language, so if the goal was to slow down typists the “er” letter arrangement would defeat that purpose. Hence why this story is largely considered untrue or insufficient in regards to how we got the qwerty keyboard.
Story #2: Evolution
Among the first people to use typewriters were telegraph operators, they needed to quickly transcribe messages. However, early typewriters had an alphabetical arrangement which the telegraph operators found to be confusing and inefficient for translating morse code. Over time the qwerty keyboard arrangement evolved as the result of the direct input from telegraph operators. The story explains the emergence of the qwerty keyboard as not a silly way to slow down typists but rather quite the opposite as a way to make typist type faster.
Story #3: Christopher Scholes
This story seems to be the one that has the most support and the one Wikipedia sights as being the most probable.
As opposed to the qwerty keyboard emerging from the input of telegraph operators across several years the story posits that the qwerty keyboard was invented by Christopher Scholes in the early 1870s. In October 1867, he filed a patent application for a writing machine he had developed. The first model was a piano-like keyboard with two rows of alphabetically arranged characters. Through a period of five years using trial and error, he came up with a letter arrangement that was close to the modern qwerty keyboard in order to perfect his writing machine. In 1873 he sold the manufacturing rights of his typing machine to E.Remington and Sons. After they purchased the device, Remington made several adjustments, creating a keyboard with essentially the modern QWERTY layout. The QWERTY layout became popular with the success of the Remington No. 2 of 1878, the first typewriter to include both upper and lower case letters, With competing companies copying the Remington design.
Which one of these stories do you think is likely to be the truth? Personally, I’m inclined to believe a mixture of the last two stories, I think Christopher Scholes was the first person to patent the qwerty keyboard but he got the inspiration from already existing keyboard letter arrangement that had been the result of input from typists of the time he simply tweaked this arraignment to arrive to what we know today as the qwerty keyboard. Regardless of how the qwerty keyboard came to be it has been the undisputed champion of keyboard arrangements except for the one time it almost got replaced.
Qwerty vs Dvorak: The Keyboard War
Many other keyboards have been invented that claim to provide faster typing than the QWERTY keyboard, the most prominent being the DVORAK keyboard. The DVORAK keyboard was invented by Augustus Dvorak in 1936. The major feature of Dvorak’s keyboard was that the most commonly used letters were in home rows, which he argued would reduce a user’s finger movement as compared to the traditional QWERTY keyboard.
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